Topic: Widelands tournament 2016; official announcements

janus and LAZA have also finished their game, LAZA won.

So, as soon as king_of_nowhere finds the time to do the scores etc, we can start on round 3

Busy indexing nil values

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PAIRINGS FOR ROUND 3 ARE OFFICIALLY OUT

You all did a good job of keeping up with the time table. No one went overtime, so we can save a week and play third round immediately. So far, I didn't have to arbitrate anything, and I only had to give a handful of minor penalties for minor infractions.

I haven't had the time to look at all the replays, but there were several interesting games. I appreciated the notabilis-tando. Tando really had his opponent by the ropes, but he failed to finish him until notabilis managed to recover. Ultimately, he couldn't deliver the killing blow because he forgot many troops in backyard sentries, along with 8 soldiers in the arena, and so he didn't have enough to kill. While notabilis did an admirable job of dismantling all his other military buldings and putting every single soldier he had in two fortresses, plus one in the labirynth. The lesson to be learned from this is, "if you have the advantage press for it with everything you have. Especially if you're barbarians against atlanteans and so you know your economy will be overtaken eventually". Meanwhile the ranking is starting to stratify a bit more.

While I hope that in the future we can still keep a good schedule, I have to announce that I will have big problems playing next week, as I managed to get busy every day from thursday to sunday included. I hope I can arrange a game tuesday or wednesdday, otherwise I will go overtime. Luckily for me, I put in the rules that one ca avoid the penalty by declaring his troubles in advance. Well, you only need to tell me, but since I am me and notifying myself would be a bit dumb, I figured I should declare it publicly

I also want to spend a few words to talk about fjords, the map of the 4th turn, because by the time I will post the 4th turn you will already have chosen your tribe, and this may influence your choice. Also, having made the map myself, I know how you're supposed to play it, and fairness requires that I share the information with you. fjords is a symmetrical map with limited build space. to the right of your headquarter there is a rugged area of forested hill with a few places where you can build small buildings. you must make sentries/guardhouses there to claim the terrain, but afterwards you should dismantle them and make foresters and woodcutters on those places. it is the best place for a wood economy, because suitable space for large buildings is limited. that way, trees won't mess up with your farming. there are pres on those mountains, but you can still make mines between trees. thoough it becomes quite messy to keep track of wwhere you already mined after a while.

large plots are limited. this favors atlanteans, who need less large buildings than other tribes. on the other hand, also wood is limited, and this disfavors atlanteans, who need a lot of it. generally, atlanteans have a harder time getting started, but then they are favored. barbarians need little wood, so they can get a good start. but they will have limited grain later, so their late game isn't that good. worst of all is poor empire, who needs plenty of large slots, especially when fish run out and they have to resort to piggeries. the good news is that fish will last a few hours, since the coastline is long, so you have reasonable chances to kill earlier. So atlantean advantage isn't evident unless the game drags for more than 2-3 hours. Though keep in mind that you have to follow the shore, so you won't have an early contact with your foe. it should take at least one hour before you spot the enemy, more if you expand slowly.

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I agree with toptopple about being hurry with tournament: it is better to add one week without being penaltized.

einstein13
calculations & maps packages: http://wuatek.no-ip.org/~rak/widelands/
backup website files: http://kartezjusz.ddns.net/upload/widelands/

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toptopple wrote:

[quote=King]No one went overtime, so we can save a week and play third round immediately.[/quote] If you allow me a comment, King, there is no need to hurry up with a tournament. In the contrary, it may gain by allowing a week or two between the rounds so people can recover from the countless efforts. And in the end it will be a longer and hence more noticed event.

Actually, the inital idea was one game per week. I made it two because there are several acceptable reasons for taking longer. Notice that there already has been more time for the second turn (11 days regular turn against the nominal 7). It's mostly because the second turn was made longer that we did not go to overtime. Also notice that there are several events that may drag the games to overtime without penalties: not only if you start a game and then interrupt it after a while you can go to the second week, but even just sending me a simple message like "I will be busy next week and cannot play before day X" is enough to avoid any complications. So, there are two weeks to play, which seem to me a reasonable time.

I fear that on the opposite end, the people who are more invested in the event will lose interest or feel the wait unnerving if there is too much waiting between turns. the previous tournament gave me this feeling. though I admit it is also possible that the waning of interest was caused by most participants being eliminated after a while.

[quote=SirVer]I am a bit torn on the strategy of holding an artifact hostage. I mean not conquering it, but owning all the land around out so that the other player cannot get to it either. On the one site it offers more strategic depth, on the other side it seems against the spirit of the win condition. [/quote] No need to be torn, I think it's good as it is! Without the "reserve" strategy possible, the match would become a simple distance race philosophy and that's not good. And you cannot avoid the possibility of such a strategy either.

I've been thinking about the issue. if we prevent the "reserve" strategy, for example by ruling that whoever gets 50%+1 of the artifacts wins the game immediately, it becomes a simple time race, which is bad. On the other hand, if both players can hold one artifact safe far from the front in reserve, then it becomes no different than autocrat. A possible solution would be to trigger an instant win if one captures 2/3 of the artifacts, even if not all have been found. that way, you can keep an artifact in reserve, but if your opponent gets a hold of all 3 central artifacts, then he will win the game. suddenly there is a reward for fighting around the artifacts, and players must balance racing towards them with being able to fight for them. currently, artifacts can be easily ignored as long as you keep control of the oone in your corner

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As calvission is a 4 player map I will set the other two players to "closed". Did I miss some rules about this?

Here are the widelands where people may dwell, walking around care that evrythings well.

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